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Please go to thebeekeepersgranddaughter.com and use the discount code A-H-T-15 at checkout to receive 15% off of your first daughter, and don't forget your Christmas presents. Welcome to Ancestral Health Today. I'm your host, Todd Becker. We're talking today with Peter Ballerstet. Peter is a leading advocate for ruminant animal agriculture. He receives his PhD from the University of Kentucky in 1986, specializing in forage management and utilization and minoring in ruminant nutrition. Peter was the forage extension specialist at Oregon State University from 1986 to 1992, and he worked for Berenberg USA, a major forage seed company, from 2011 until his retirement this past July, and he's the current president of the American Forage and Grassland Council. Peter describes himself as building bridges between the two tribes he belongs to, those who produce grass-eating animals like cattle and sheep, and those who particularly appreciate consuming them and their nutritional and health benefits in ancestral diets, for example, that include animal products like meat, eggs, and dairy. He's in demand internationally as a conference speaker for both tribes, so I'm honored to have him on our podcast today. So I'm going to start out by noting that many of us who have adopted a low-carb keto or more broadly ancestral diet are often finding ourselves being challenged by friends or media messages about the supposed negative impact of meat-based diets on our health and for the environment. And in today's episode of Ancestral Health Today, Peter's going to help us make the positive case for the nutritional and sustainability benefits of meat in the human diet. So welcome, Peter. Thank you, Todd. It's nice to see you. It's been a while and thank you for the opportunity. Yeah, so why don't we start out sort of on your personal journey. Can you tell the audience about what first got you interested in low-carb ancestral diets and the science behind it and the connection with health? Well, my joke is that in 19, sorry, yeah, in 2007, I was a 51-year-old balding obese prediabetic, and today I'm just balding because at that point, Nancy, my wife, who'd been on this journey for five years already, and you have to think back to what, you know, 2002 was like in terms of information, but she had already been reading, and so she introduced me to several people, books, websites, and you know what, good calories, bad calories came out the next year and in 2010. So I had the predictable results, right? You restrict carbohydrate sufficiently for each individual and you begin to see metabolic improvements, and I did. And then in 2010, I attended a joint meeting of the American Bariatric Physicians Society and the Nutrition Metabolism Society that was up in Seattle, which it's only like five hours away, and, you know, Tabs is going to be there and, you know, Eads was going to be there, he wasn't speaking, but he was attending, and, you know, I got to meet Finney for the first time, and, you know, all these people, Wartman, they're all there. One of my favorites, though, has to be meeting at Del Height. And, you know, how it is when you go to some of these things and you're unknown and you're not really bold, and so where do I sit at the dinner, you know, and I fumbled, I hesitated, and I ended up getting stuck. I put air quotes around that, sitting next to Adele, and that just changed the course of my life since then. I think, Peter, you introduced me to Adele at one of the AHS conferences, and a lot of people know Gary Tabs is and know who Michael Eats is, but for the audience, can you say a little bit about Adele's role in this whole story? Sure. Adele Height sadly gone too soon. When I met her, I don't think she had started on her doctorate yet, but very quickly after she was starting, and then there was a whole problem because she was asking questions that her department faculty didn't want her to ask. And so she ended up having to shift to a different major in a different university. But she, you know, she goes back to working in Eric Westman's lab with patients. I mean, she was a registered dietitian. I think she had a master's in medicine, something to do with public health. In any case, she too was a bridge builder. She was somebody that knew an awful lot about the dietary guidelines, the ins and outs, and was involved. That's kind of what her work was about. She was working with populations at the low end of the income scale and probably saw that some of the standard American guidelines from standard dietary practices weren't working with her population. Right. I mean, she gave me two of my rules, the first being that we have to find ways that we can work with people that we're not going to agree with 100%. If you're with a group of people you agree with 100%, you're probably an occult. So let's find out how we can work. If somebody can agree that we ought to be focusing on providing adequate essential nutrition and to maintaining metabolic health. Now, I have quibbles with both of those because, you know, rather than adequate, I'd like optimal and rather than maintaining, we might have to look at restoring giving the statistics. But nevertheless, if we can agree on those as priorities for policy or for direction, then, yeah, then we can have, of course, the following conversations. What is essential nutrition? How much of that is adequate? And those are conversations that we'll probably get into in some specific instances. So Adele was someone that taught me the value of communication and discipline in, you know, what I say and how I say it and how I think about things. And yeah, I, she was the person that I had come to my forage and grassland council tribe and speak on a couple of occasions. And she was always well received. She was very articulate, very intelligent and she presented well. And so that role of crossing from one tribe to the other is something that I also value. So going back then, you had this role in, with a business role and sort of an industry role in forage. That was one tribe, as you say it, that's your room in an agricultural animal agriculture and providing the feedstocks for that. And then, on the other hand, you had lost weight and improved your metabolic health by going on a basically a low carb diet. And so these are two different streams. And how did that come together for you then? Well, it certainly wasn't a considered path. It's something that happened. And I'm grateful for the opportunities. At first, you know, I don't know your reaction if you read good calories, bad calories, what your first reaction was. Mine was, I got mad. You know, I got mad because I felt like we were lied to. I felt like people had gotten away with things in their disciplines that would not have been allowed in my disciplines. And then these people had unfairly accused the people I'd been trained to serve with all kinds of harm to the American public, when in fact, it's arguable that it's just the reverse or at least that's my perspective. So, okay, I'm mad. Now we get over that. What can I do? And I started to think, you know, I'm not the, you know, I know lots of people that don't know this information. And I think it's really important for more people to know this information personally. And then you could think on the broader context, you know, a lot of the people I was trained to serve live in rural areas, right? That makes sense. And there's a rural urban divide when it comes to health in the United States. And you can see rates of diabetes and rates of obesity that are worse in rural counties than in urban areas. Now, of course, you can find differences within those areas. But, you know, this again speaks to the issue. And then as I went along, it was at the joint meeting in Seattle that I realized one that I knew things that a lot of the people there didn't know about their own subjects. It was really weird. There was one particular point that stands out because I had played Stump the Speaker with the first hideous speaker that was up. And afterwards, you know, people were coming to me to talk to me about what was that all about? What were you saying? Whatever. And this one group of practitioners from the Midwest were talking to me and I was saying things and they're going, wait a minute, now you're saying, and I said, yeah, that's right. Have you read Gary Talbs' book? And they hadn't. I said, well, it's on sale in the bookstore. But when he speaks tomorrow, he's going to talk about this subject and he'll probably say something like, okay, and the next day when he spoke and said word for word what I had told her, he would say, they literally turned in their chair and looked at me and I said, it's okay. It's okay. So okay. So I have that experience and then at the same time, I know things about agriculture that many people don't know or, you know, the meat industry writ large and I kind of twitch at that term, but we can get into that. So there were things that I knew about food production, environmental issues that people in the metabolic health space didn't know. So I thought, okay, here's a way that I can be useful. You can connect the two. So the people listening to this podcast will be familiar with the carbohydrate insulin hypothesis and the benefits of restricting carbohydrates, but maybe they don't know as much as you do about meat and particularly meat from ruminant animals. And just to clarify, ruminants are animals that eat grass, right, like cows and sheep and goats. Well, yeah, specifically ruminants, they have cloven hooves. They have multi compartmented stomachs. So a horse would also eat grass, but it doesn't have the multi compartmented stomach. It has a single hoof. Okay. So, you know, first of all, there's a whole lot of people that know a whole lot more about meat. There's a whole meat science discipline, right? You know, muscle biology is a thing from a livestock perspective, let alone a human perspective. There's a lot of people that know a lot more about forages than I do. I just happen to be this dot connector in the middle. So that's my preface. So ruminants have a unique ecological niche. And in fact, their evolution long predates Homo sapien, long, long, tens of millions of years longer. And so I make the statement that modern Homo sapien would not exist had there not been ruminants. And modern societies depend on ruminant animal agriculture. And we won't meet the goals of the world of 2050 without improving the productivity and efficiency of ruminant animal agriculture systems globally. You know, different animals, different location, different resources, so it's going to look different. But there's work to be done in each of those areas. Let's start with the health side. And I would like to get into the environmental side of this. But I want to sort of ground the discussion in what is it that we get from meat and also other animal products, you know, eggs, dairy, that we can't get from a purely plant based diet? Because one of the big themes of recent times is we've got to move to a plant based diet. And there's a lot of environmental issues there. But let's start with the health issues. What do we get from meat that we can't? Well, yeah, let me just say that humanity's diet is already plant based. And I'm going to suggest that's the problem. But specifically, animal source foods provide us the essential amino acids that we need in the right balance and they're highly utilizable. Plant source foods, on the other hand, vary tremendously in their composition. So, you know, people look at labels or tables and they treat that value as if it's a, you know, a fixed, it isn't. So, okay, that's one. Number two, the amino acids in plant source foods are not in the proper ratios that we need for optimal protein utilization. Number three, they tend to be less digestible because of a number of other things you get in plant source foods that interfere with absorption, let alone utilization. Those are two different things. And then the fourth thing is that when we process wheat is the single largest source of crude protein in humanity's food supply. Rice is second, okay, and then corn, right, and products, you know, so these are really poor protein sources, but because of the nature of today's world, that's the major sources. So, when we process those cereals and make them brown and crispy, we actually decrease the amount of utilizable amino acid specifically lysine in the finished product. So, while it was limiting to begin with, we make it even more so when we process, and nobody eats raw wheat berries, right? I mean kernels, right? We're going to make them into bread, we're going to make them into cereal, whatever, okay. So, there's that that we get from animal source versus plant source foods, but of course, we get far more essential nutrition than merely the amino acids as important as they are. We also get things like vitamin B12, which is formed by the microorganisms in the rumen and then absorbed by the host animal, and then we can get them from meat and milk. There are other vitamins similarly formed. There are other compounds, bioactive compounds that we can get only from animal source foods or significantly choline would be another one. The minerals that are absorbed by the ruminants from the forage are then supplied to us in a more utilizable form like heme iron, as opposed to the iron in plants, or zinc would be another key shortfall nutrient. You know, the difference between actual retinol versus beta-carotene, you know, some of us are restricted in our ability to convert beta-carotene into retinol, so preformed is better. So, there's a lot of those and then we could look at essential fatty acids that are supplied. And I make the statement sometimes just to, you know, provoke people, but I say, if you can't get it from animal source foods, you don't need it. Now, if you can, you know, if you'd like the variety of plant source foods and you can tolerate them, you know, wonderful. I'm not really interested in telling anybody what they should eat. On the other hand, we do get into, as you say, the environmental conversations. And unfortunately, a lot of those come preloaded with assumptions about what we should be eating. And then they build these systems that are really based on some very poor assumptions. So, just again, sticking with the health issues, you've talked about that protein is not just a universal homogeneous macronutrient. It varies in quality. And yet when you pick up a package in the supermarket, there's a protein percent there, but protein is not all the same, right? The protein from wheat or this processed protein is not going to give you the full spectrum of the amino acids that you need for the complete protein. Now, I do remember this argument sort of came up in the 1970s and there was that book, Diet for a Small Planet, right? Which was, and I remember they dealt with this issue. People were challenging Francis Morelepe that you can't get all the amino acids that you need. And her pushback was, well, okay, corn is deficient in lysine, but I can add legumes in and I can balance this or soy is more complete. So, are you saying that you really can't, even by being careful as a vegetarian, combine plant foods to get really what you need optimally that you could get from animal foods? No, I don't want to say that, but we shouldn't just pass over that phrase carefully, because to do it, you need information that most people don't have. Some people, frankly, are allergic to soy or are going to avoid, so then what? Because, you know, so yes, in theory, but we live in California and Oregon, not in theory. And so, you know, and at certain ages, it becomes even trickier so that, for example, the example that I heard an eight-year-old boy could not physically eat enough rice and lentils to meet his lysine requirements if he had unlimited access, just gut size. Now, of course, if you're stuffing your gut with rice and lentils, what else are you getting? A load of phytate, you know, a load of fiber, a load of carbohydrate, all of those things could well be problematic, so you could, you know, so there's a number of issues. The more plant source food in the diet, the lower the digestibility of a given protein source. Right, so now if you're going to tell me you're going to have cereal with some meat, well, okay, then the meat could more likely supplement, you know, fill the holes and you wouldn't need the bulk that you would, you know, going to these other, you know, foodstuffs to try to balance. And then back to the point, most people don't understand what the amino acid content of these foods are. It was what, 2011 when a FAO expert consultation said that they should start listing individual indispensable amino acids on labels and tables, like any other nutrient. Well, we haven't made much progress on it. And partly this requires a new methodology of qualification of the amino acids, which it gets more complicated. So I guess one of the thoughts is the further away you get from the natural diet, the more complicated it gets to try to make up for the fact that you're getting further away from the natural diet. Right, so if you just eat animal source foods as part of every meal, right, and I would say the basis of every meal, but that's me, then you probably don't need to worry about these things. So another example, if I take wheat, wheat is a poor quality protein source, as I mentioned, even for an adult, it's only about a 50 on the diet scale and lysine is limiting. We make it into something like whole wheat bread, and we chop that in half. We make it into a brown crispy breakfast cereal, and we essentially make all that lysine unavailable. Okay, now if I, and I'm not recommending this, I don't do this, but if you were to put real dairy on your breakfast cereal, there would be sufficient lysine in the real dairy to make up for the lack. And so you could have a complete protein in that meal. But what happens if you put plant juice beverage on it instead? Well, we don't know because it hasn't been required for them to determine it. So when you see protein on a table, in a table or on a label, it is in fact a value for crude protein, not true protein. And crude protein is calculated, it's an estimate. We take the percent nitrogen in a sample of that feed or food, we multiply that percent nitrogen by 6.25. And that converts percent nitrogen into crude protein, because we assume that all the nitrogen that was there was in protein and all the protein was 16% nitrogen. And then people drop the crude off and they call it protein and now everybody's confused. So potatoes, for example, as much as a quarter of the nitrogen in potatoes can be a non-protein nitrogen. But it gets converted into a crude protein value when we do that calculation. Now for ruminants, again, back to ruminants, one of the things that ruminants can do is because of their microorganisms in their rumen, they can take the non-protein nitrogen and form microbial protein out of it, which the host animal then digests. So there's no such thing as an essential amino acid in a ruminant's diet. There's no such thing as an essential fatty acid in a ruminant's diet. There are two forms of carbohydrates that are essential for proper rumen function. Contrast to humans, we have essential amino acids. We have essential fatty acids, but there's no essential carbohydrate. That's a nice connection. I think you've pointed out that ruminants upcycle nutrients, right? So they can take the grain that they eat or the grass they eat and the lysine value goes way up. And then they can create nutrients that don't exist there, some of the long-chain essential fatty acids, the EPA, the DHA. So they are essentially factories for these essential nutrients for us. But as you said, they're able to supply that themselves, right? Well, they, in that symbiotic relationship with those microorganisms, yes, absolutely. It starts with utilizing cellulose, fiber, which is the most abundant carbohydrate in the biosphere. And they're just glucose units hooked together. But just differently than glucose units are hooked together when you make starch. No vertebrate animal makes cellulase as the enzyme necessary to break those apart to get the energy. But the microbes in the ruminant and also in the environment are capable of producing cellulase and degrading that. Now, a beef cow, for example, you can't put more than about five or six percent crude fat in her diet. Or you start interfering, depressing fiber digestion because fat is toxic to the ruminant environment. And interestingly, polyunsaturated fats are more toxic. And so one of the defense mechanisms, if you will, of the ruminant environment is this biohydrogenation process that converts poly to mono and unsaturated fatty acids. In any case, one of the products of the microbial breakdown fermentation of fiber is volatile fatty acids, short chain volatile fatty acids. And those are absorbed again by the host animal. So she eats a diet that may be five or six percent crude fat. She ends up getting 70% or so of her energy from these volatile fatty acids. So they're converting these carbohydrates into fat for us instead of us. And if you think about humanity's origin, it's in the grasslands, it's in the savanna, that sort of open tree grass landscape. Not a lot of fat there. It's not one, you know, except for the animals. You talk about our origins in grasslands. And, you know, a lot of people are confused on the differences between humans and other primates, like, you know, gorillas and chimpanzees. They're able to eat a more plant-based diet because it's a completely different metabolism. Can you say more about that? And then what happened between those primates and humans and the relationships of the grasslands? Well, as I remember the expensive gut hypothesis, the theory is, the hypothesis is, that you have this primate who exploits the ecological niche of being a scavenger, of accessing marrow and bones and brains and skulls that the carnivores weren't, the predators weren't utilizing. That's a very rich diet, doesn't require the large gut that a fibrous, low quality plant mostly diet requires. And so then that allowed for shifts where energy that was necessary to support the larger gut is now available to support a bigger brain, we're onboarding lots of raw material to build a bigger brain with. You know, there's certain behaviors that go along with that that might have favored, you know, one path over another. And so over time, you end up with primates that have different size digestive systems and different size brains for body size. And then you find some other interesting things too, like apparently somewhere since the divergence between what became chimpanzee and what became us, we lost the ability to absorb B12 from the front of our large intestine and chimps didn't. So that should have been a lethal mutation, should have taken care of itself, except if that those organisms were eating a diet that was rich in B12 and wasn't dependent on the microbial fermentation from the large intestine. And there's a couple others like that. I've thought it would be really cool if we could find somebody put a list together of all those because I find that kind of compelling and maybe it's on my to-do list at some point. So this connection between humans and ruminants, you said actually sprang out of the fact that ruminants were here a lot longer than we were. But then there was some kind of co-evolution there or we became intertwined with the ruminants and we're able to eat ruminants. How did ruminant agriculture originate? How did humans start sourcing? I guess it differs with different animals. I think goats might have been the first one followed by sheep or maybe the other way and cattle or more recent, of course, horses come in there as one of the species that changed humanity. And I've come to define agriculture as man's modifying its environment to increase the production of biomass. And there's lots of ways you can do that. And fire is one of them. We've used anthropogenic fire for many, many, many, many, many years. Eastern seaboard Native Americans used it to keep the forest more open so that it was easier to gather nuts and also so that be better for wildlife and better hunting and that sort of thing. So is that agriculture? Well, in a sense it is. It's not tilling the ground, although they were doing that too prior to Columbus. But we're domesticating a resource for our benefit, right? So it's that domestication or that, yeah. Well, nature is not abundant. So in order to increase the yield from wherever we are, humans have figured out what to do to achieve those goals. And somewhere along the line, some particular animals were more amenable to human presence, and okay, so then they gathered and then they were protected and then you develop selection. You know, the common idea is that it goes back, what, 10,000 years or something. And I don't, you know, I wonder how much further back it could be pushed if we really went looking because a lot of these things are kind of hard to find. But you know, the movement with herds is something that happened, right? That was one of the reasons for migrations or even seasonal patterns. Today, we still have a significant number of pastoralists who are not tied to one place but move over large tracts of land. And that certainly is a form of agriculture. So I see that happening. But then when we look at a cow today or we look at, you know, any other animal that's livestock, this is every bit of creation of man as, you know, hybrid corn is. So it's, it really is part of that absolutely essential and long-standing relationship. And of course, until recently agriculture in North America looked a lot different than it does today. But in large parts of the world, it looks a lot different than North America. Yeah. So while we're still on the topic of health, one of the critiques of relying on beef and lamb, but mainly on beef is that we're not eating, we're eating feedlot animals, which may start out on grass, but they're shifted to grains. And that this changes the composition of the meat, the ratio of omega-3s and omega-6s change. And we're not getting the same benefits. And there's a lot of hardcore folks in the ancestral community who insist the only meat you can eat is grass-fed. And undoubtedly, there's some benefits there. But is there a big enough difference there to stress out about grass-fed versus conventional beef? Or if we're going to look at this as a dietary model for populations and low-income populations, should we be insisting on everything's got to be grass-fed all the way through? Or can we be a little bit less stringent there? Yeah, I think that's the critical point. And that's certainly where I'm occupying. You know, I'm worried about a population. I'm worried about parts of the world where they don't have the choices that we have here. But then there's other points as well, like even in the United States, a commercial steer, only 10% of its lifetime feed is going to be corn primarily. So only 10% is human-edible. So another of the arguments that's thrown up is, well, you know, if we weren't feeding all that feed to livestock, we could feed more people. As if feeding corn and soy to people is an option. Okay, fine. That's another conversation. But only 10%. So it turns out to be not as great as many people think. And we've already covered upcycling. So the beef that's produced, it produces 240% more human-edible lysine than they consume in the corn. And yes, there are differences. The biological significance of those differences, I think, are not as well-established as many people believe them to be. And I've had many conversations with people about a number of differences. And at the end of the day, we're left saying, what information is there available in the marketplace to help people make decisions? None of this is going to be because you can have great variations in these contents. Well, ratios first. Let's deal with that point first. So soybean oil has a ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 that's better than a pork chop, far better than walnuts. Okay, now, of course, that's a ludicrous example, right? Because ratios don't give you the quantity. And the quantity is what we need to be looking at. And ruminant animal flesh, regardless of how it's finished, is not a particularly rich source of omega-6 or omega-3. But if somebody is concerned about that, if they are saying it can only be grass-fed, then enjoy your beef, enjoy your lamb from your grass-fed producer. Don't eat fish. Well, don't eat pork, don't eat chicken, don't eat walnuts. Okay. So I can eat conventional beef and then have some salmon, and I'm getting pretty much what I need, right? Well, yeah. And there's the other question too, because a lot of the early papers didn't differentiate between animal source omega-6 and plant source omega-6. And so are they the same thing? I'm an agronomist, so I just ask these questions. And at the end of the day, I know too many people who that is not one of their guiding principles, and they're healthy, they're happy. And again, it has to be what you can afford, right? It has to be available, and it has to be appropriate to the people, whatever our solutions are. And there is a question at the end too about, you know, it's one thing to live in a country where you have a relatively mild temperature year-round and you have consistent rainfall year-round, so you have grass growing year-round. Most of the United States is not that way. And so we're going to have some system of wintering or confinement for these animals, where we're going to feed them some kind of feed because there isn't pasture to graze. Now, on the other side, a lot of the work that my colleagues and I are involved in is trying to minimize the hay-feeding season, right? Because that's expensive, and you know, there are things that you can do to shorten that. But still, at some point, in most of the United States, you're going to have a period where those animals are, so then what? You know, and if this increases the productivity and efficiency of the animal ag system as a whole, that reduces the environmental impact. And so again, this is a complicated thing with many factors, but it's all part of what we could, you know, spend some time looking at. Okay, but can you just give me your view on this? How important is it to eat grass-fed beef? It's not something that I insist. Just eat meat. I enjoy your meat. Yeah, be sure to take your daily meds. Your daily meds, meat, eggs, dairy, seafood, right? That's what Dr. Ballerstead advises. That's great. So let's zoom out and look at population trends. I think you've said that most of the world is already on a plant-based diet or mostly plant-based diet, at least as far as protein and energy. What are the trends there? How much are global populations getting from plant versus animal? And then where is that going? Are we going up in animal protein, down in animal protein? What are the trends we see across the world? Well, yeah, we're a couple years behind in the estimates, and that's got to do with our response to the pandemic, which didn't make things better. I think that we're globally, we're certainly in that 60-some percent. Peter, we'll put some link. You've got some great talks with charts on this, and we'll definitely put that in the show notes. So I don't want to quiz you on this, but I guess I'm wondering, yeah, are we with this demand to move to plant-based, are we already mostly plant-based? Yes. So globally, 57% of our fat is coming from plant source foods in humanity's food supply. 82% of our calories are coming from plant source foods, and 60% of our protein, and again, that's crude protein, is coming from plant source foods. And so that was the latest figures. It varies by region, and of course, you could drill in. If you look at Africa, it's like 93% of calories is coming from plant source foods. But even in America, we're at like 75% in the Americas, so north and south. And so, yes, if we drilled in, we would see differences. What are those trends say about human health? Because you're saying that we really need more reliance on animal protein. I think you've used the phrase overfed and undernourished. We're getting plenty of calories from plants, and there's a demand to go more in that direction. Is that going to make global health worse? Is there a connection with the obesity epidemic or other epidemics by this push toward plant-based nutrition? Well, I think that you can make a strong case for the strong association between the dietary guidelines and a, well, here back to Adele. It's not fair to say that the dietary guidelines cause the obesity epidemic, but it is fair to say they damn sure didn't prevent it. That was their promise, right? Now, you can look at it, and yeah, I have no problem seeing how shifting us to more carbohydrate, more plant source lipids did not help our health. So that's, and I think that, yes, my point is, if we pursue this goal of greater plant material in our diet, we will worsen public health. And there's far too many parts of the world where we already have children that are not developing their brains properly because they're not getting the nutrients that they need because they don't have access to the meat, eggs, dairy, seafood that even WHO says is the best source of those essential nutrients, right? And what is it? With six months to two years, something, six months to three years, something in that time frame, UNICEF says that 60% of children in that age group do not get meat, eggs, dairy, seafood. You've also said that it's not just the developing world, that even in the United States, people are not getting adequate nutrition. Yeah. Well, a fifth of women of childbearing age in US and UK are anemic. Okay. You know, we have some data points that sort of, you know, so Cordane in 2000, I think, released work looking at the percent of calories coming from animal source food in hunter-gatherer populations and found a range from 30 to 100% of calories with a mean somewhere in 70, right? And then we have a paper that came out much more recently by Nordhagen, forget the exact year, and they showed that when populations get less than 30% of their calories from animal source foods, you start to see these rapidly increasing micronutrient deficiencies. Deficiencies. Okay. Just an interesting, you know, like that 30%, you know, okay. And then there was an even more recent paper by Vue and colleagues that said that if we're not getting at least half of our protein from animal source foods, we're not going to be meeting our non-protein nutrient requirements. Okay. Now, yes, theoretically, you could supplement this, but supplementation is not viable for low-income countries and most middle-income countries, and we could have a good debate about how effective it is in high-income countries. I think you made a really good point early on in our conversation that, yes, you can carefully try to engineer this, but that's not the real world that we live in. And we have to think about populations and be pragmatic here. So I want to shift to the environmental side of the story because, okay, let's stipulate that everything you said is right nutritionally in terms of health. We want to make it possible for growing populations to shift to ruminant meat-based diets more and more to get the adequate nutrition. The pushback is, oh my gosh, that's going to mess up the environment because cows generate methane, which is a greenhouse gas. The agriculture cycle is moving us in the wrong direction. And so what's wrong with that story? Lots of things. Number one, I'm going to push back against the we can't argument and my statement is we must. It's a moral imperative. We have to find a way to do this. Okay, that's that out of the way. Yes, methane is produced as a result of the rumin microbial activity breaking down fiber, which is an absolutely essential process. Interestingly enough, Monsanto and some colleagues last spring released a paper that said or published data paper that said that there were comparable greenhouse gas emissions from wildlife dominated savannas and livestock dominated savannas. So some place we've got this idea running around that there's a zero emission world somewhere. You know, grasslands have to be grazed or burnt in order for them to remain as grasslands and be healthy. Okay, I think grazing them is a better option. And so if it's comparable emissions from wildlife and livestock, let's find ways to create systems that fit those environments so that human beings can get the essential nutrition that they require. There's other issues with methane. The last IPCC assessment itself said that because they've been using one estimate of global warming potential, they were overestimating the impact of enteric methane, the methane that's burped out by ruminants by a factor of three to four times. And underestimating the impact of the methane that might come from, you know, fossil fuel or other industrial. Basically, what they're trying to acknowledge is that when a ruminant burps out methane, it's coming from carbohydrate that was produced by photosynthesis, which was taking CO2 out of the atmosphere building plant material that the cow ate, some portion of that gets burped out as methane, that methane gets oxidized to CO2 in about 10 years. The cycling is, to me, this is the thing that's overlooked here, because if you look at fossil fuel combustion, you're taking a stored source of carbon, burning it, it's going in the atmosphere, it's unit directional, it's going up there. Yes, there are geological processes that will weather it and bring it back down, but those aren't a long time scale. Whereas, if you look at the ruminant grass cycle, that carbon is just moving in a circle, right? The methane goes up, it's oxidized to CO2, it gets fixed by the grass, which the cow eats. And I think that's the part of the story that somehow is missing is that the grass is part of this story, right? So, do the grasslands actually return those greenhouse gases and form a cycle? And is that a stable cycle? And hasn't that existed for millions of years already? Yes. So, we have grass pollen in the fossil record that goes back 50-some million years. Been doing this for a while. The soils being stabilized and then built under perennial grass communities in many parts of the world. The corn belt is built on the decaying body of the tall grass prairie, right? So, in the one system with the cow and the grass, we add no CO2 to the atmosphere. And when we burn fossil fuels, obviously we do, right? Or when we have methane from coal, when we have natural seeps of methane or it leaks from gases or well from coal mines or wells, then when that's oxidized, it's new relatively, new, it's adding CO2 to the atmosphere. So, that's that different. And there's a lot more in this space that you could talk about, right? But that's just that key feature. At the same time, I want to say, you know, because everything we do has impacts, right? There's no solutions, there's only trade-offs. And we're not good at evaluating them because we too frequently like ours and, you know, don't like yours. And so, I'm going to minimize my impacts and maximize my benefits. And I'm going to do the reverse to you. And at the end of the day, what's the environmental impact of the healthcare industry? And anytime we talk about sustainability, and I know people, I know these communities, they're doing serious work on sustainability. But anytime you do that work, you need to be looking at economic societal as well as environmental factors. And there are multiple factors in each one of those three legs to the, you know, sustainability stool, if you will. And too often, the whole sustainability thing has been degenerated to only looking at environmental and then only looking at greenhouse gas emissions. It's just looking at one limited part of what sustainability really is about, which is how do you sustain a society? And health is part of that. The resources that go into health are huge, right? So if we can move toward a healthier society, that's going to save resources. But it's also a world where we can flourish. Already in the United States, if you look at the EPA sources and sink budget for greenhouse gas emissions, you have to know what you're looking for for a number of reasons. But basically, agriculture gets put into the land use, land use change bucket that includes forestry. And already that sector, so you also have energy and you also have, you know, industry and you have transportation, you have residential, it's different buckets that they apportion anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions into for the United States. Land use is carbon negative today in the United States. And, you know, if you pull apart agriculture specifically, you find that, you know, of the emissions, not looking at any sequestration, the emissions from livestock agriculture are less than the emissions from plant agriculture. They're, I mean, I'm glad you brought up crop agriculture because that's not a cycle in the same way that ruminant agriculture is, right? Well, yeah, so you certainly need different inputs, right? So you tend to use more fertilizer, you know, for producing commodity crops than you do for livestock on pasture, you tend to need other inputs, fuel, that sort of thing. And then, you know, do you dry the crop after you harvest it so it stores safely? All of that is going to use energy. On the other hand, you know, you've got a perishable product that needs refrigeration, right? So, you know, there are people looking at all this, but I just pulled some data because of all the COP28 stuff that's going on. So all of livestock agriculture, the emissions are 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions, 1111, just like 6.3 gigatons. Okay. If you, and then I came across this because I read stuff, and it said 5% of the world's coal power plants, that's 150 plants, right? Scattered across the world. If we could replace them, they produce 9 gigatons. So if we were to replace the 5% of the heaviest emitting coal power, or 5% of the coal power plants in the world, the heaviest emitters, we would reduce the emissions, you know, assuming we go to nuclear instead, right? Or some zero emission system carbon capture, whatever you want to imagine. But this is the scale, right? Replacing those 150 plants would make a reduction in the emissions 150% greater than if we eliminated all livestock agriculture. And of course, if we do that, and there are other estimates that say, but you'd actually not make that, you know, full, because you have to increase plant source food production, you know, then you have other issues, then you have health issues, you have all these unforeseen consequences, but just looking at this. If you take the livestock out, they won't be grazing the grass, and that grass isn't growing. And so, again, you have to look at the whole cycle, you can't just take one piece of the cycle. Well, over half of the nitrogen that's used to produce human edible crops in the world is coming from the newer. How are you going to replace that? Half of the world's farmers are still relying on draft animals. Most of those are ruminants, but in any case, they're livestock. So are you going to buy them cabotas? I mean, how is that going to work, right? And that's fuel. So, okay, there's an offset there. Now, Holland White did an estimate of what would the result of eliminating animal agriculture in America in the US be? And they ended up with something like less than 2.5% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. And it was less than a half a percent globally, but it would come at the cost of imbalancing our food system. And they said creating, I would say, exacerbating essential nutrient deficiencies. Okay, so, yeah, so these are good statistics. So there's one more piece of the environmental story, and that is, okay, let's assume this is the way to go nutritionally, and that in fact, we're not disturbing the carbon cycle, but we have this population that's going to reach what, 9 billion people by 2050 or thereabouts. And how are we going to feed these folks? Is there enough land if we start raising a lot more cattle and sheep? Is there physically enough grassland to do the job? Well, that's a key question. But on the other side of that, we're talking about integrated systems, right? So let's just look at, we have animals that are being produced in Montana, cow-calf operation, right? So we have those calves being born in the spring to coincide with the green up. And then in the fall, we wean those animals and we ship them off literally to greener pastures, right? We move them physically. Okay, so there's this transfer of animals through our agricultural systems. In other parts of the world, they do much the same thing. Now, what we get to see, and I was last month in Brazil as part of an integrated livestock cropping system conference, where they've been doing work showing how we can produce more food on the same land with less inputs and achieve benefits for soil. And so here's a quick example that they use. Their system is typically they grow soybeans, that's the cash crop, then at or short sometime around harvest, they'll plant a winter annual pasture crop. And then they'll, and this is subtropical kind of area. So they'll graze that pasture through the late fall, winter, early spring, and then they'll go back into soybeans. That's their typical system. Because soybeans is the cash crop, of course, that's where they put the fertilizer. But they said, what happens if we put the fertilizer on the forage? So they start thinking about system fertilization, not crop fertilization. And when they put the fertilizer on the pasture, not surprisingly, they got more pasture produced, more forage, and not surprisingly, that produced more beef. They're grazing these weaned animals, we call them stockers, to put several hundred pounds on them before they go somewhere else. And then what was surprising was when they grew the soybeans, they got the same soybean yield as they did when they put the fertilizer on the soybeans. Because the nutrients that the animals consume go back onto the field and the vast majority of them, if we manage them in that way, stay in that area, they don't leave the farm. So now you're getting all these winds. So that's helping with the soy production and whatever. But just net, if we shift the balance more to animal protein and away from plant protein, is there enough grassland, or could we convert crop to grassland, or could we actually reclaim? Let's stop converting grassland. You know, I was just down in the pompous, that's a far more endangered biome than the Cerrado or the Tropical Rainforest. And it's because of these pressures from cash cropping. But plugging into national systems is something that we have to acknowledge. But let's, you know, Brazil has three times the cattle that we do, but they produce less beef. You know, 20% of the world's cattle live in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet they're essentially not monetized or commercialized. So there's a lot of work with what we already have. Right? We could do far, you know, like 40% of the meat that is potentially produced, I think that's the figure, is condemned because of disease. So animal health is a critical thing, right? And so there's all these pieces. And then we have to acknowledge that there's rule of law, there's land ownership rights, there's stability of government, you know, all of these other issues that are all part of things that need to be. So I can't just go to my shelf and pull off the agronomy book and send it and say, good, problem sorted, what's next. Right? But if we don't, if the people in leadership are still thinking that the solution lies in, you know, climate indulgences and getting people to eat less animal-sourced food, and therefore, by the way, probably produce less, right, cut down the number of animals, I mean, that's all wrong direction. We have to get people to understand that this is absolutely required to meet all these goals that people say they want to meet. And another, it's essential, you're not going to achieve these goals that people have said they want to meet if we don't deal with this honestly. There's a lot of inefficiencies in meat production today. We could attack those inefficiencies, right, and make a lot of gains there. Are there marginal lands that could be used for, you know, ruminants so we could actually expand the herds? And it, I guess, has anyone sat down with a pencil and paper or a spreadsheet and shown that it is at least theoretically possible to grow enough meat to feed the world's population? Well, yeah. I mean, I've done, I think we call it cowboy math, you know, back of the envelope kind of stuff. Now you want to be more sophisticated than it depends on what assumptions you want to build into your model. You know, right now people are saying that by 2050 there's going to be a two-thirds increase in demand for animal source protein globally. I've told people that that's an underestimate because they're not accounting for the fact that, one, you're driving towards an RDA, which is a minimum, not a target. And number two, that target probably needs to be maybe 50% higher, maybe 100% higher for seniors. And the increase in population globally is going to come from people getting to live long enough to be seniors, not necessarily children. You know, one estimate that I saw was, you know, by 2100 there's going to be the same number of human beings 15 and under as there are today. And yet we keep having these conversations about, you know, population growth. And it's like, well, but that's not the point if that's right. Right. The point is that Africans are going to get to live to be 70 and 80. And Southwest Asians are going to get to live to be 70 and 80. And by the way, that comes with some challenges too. Right. We have systems that are based on young people supporting older people and we're not getting as many young people or getting a whole lot of older people like me. So that has an impact, but we're not having those conversations were, you know, distracted with these other myths and narratives and worldviews. So we have a great deal of idle farmland in the United States, you know, and that has economic ramifications. Right. So there's, we, two of my mentors in forage agronomy, I had the opportunity to be in a pickup truck with them for several days, rolling through the countryside. I felt like I, you know, hadn't studied for my orals and here we are, you know. And I said at one point, have you ever been anywhere in the world where you haven't looked at the land you were going through and say, look, just look at the potential? You know, we have not really approached what's possible. And so okay, you know, let's, if it's really helpful to go through the calculation. But again, I'm going to get back to the point of if, if everything I think I know about human health and flourishing is right, then this is a moral imperative. So I use the analogy, although I'm going to back away from it a little bit for reasons I can explain. In the 60s and 70s, we had a green revolution when, and when they were focused on providing sufficient calories to prevent a billion people from starvation, right? And that was like a quarter of the population. Today, we've got over 42% of the population being malnourished, right? 820 some million people are calorically undernourished, but we got 2.6 billion people that are overweight or obese. That's malnutrition. Unfortunately, people in the guild looking at this call this over nutrition, right? Because they think that obesity is the result of overeating and sedentary behavior. I'm trying to say, you know, it's malnutrition, okay? And now our challenge is to provide a diet of sufficient quality, right? Not raw calories. It's the quality diet. So I used to call that the ruminant revolution partly for the alliteration. The word revolution is problematic in some parts of the world and within some groups. So okay, a friend of mine or someone I just met recently, actually, I would like to call them a friend. So why don't you just drop the r, call it the ruminant evolution. And now you can talk about the whole story of humanity from the grass. So, you know, humanity's roots are in the grasslands and our future is as well. And I like that. That's a great statement. Our roots and our future, right? It ties it all together. So I think you've made some great arguments and you've skewered a couple of sacred cows, sorry for the pun. I'm sure you've had that before. But there's, Peter, there's only a handful of folks like you who are articulating these arguments, you know, you, Diana Rogers, Rob Wolf, I know others about both the health and the environmental story and the moral case for doing this. So I guess, you know, I kind of like to end is, are you seeing signs that your message is being received that you're making headway? Because you are going up against the dominant narrative. What are the things that are making you hopeful that the story could change here? Well, so one point I'd just like to make before I get into that. And that is, I talked earlier about increasing the yield of biomass, right? But the majority of that biomass is not human edible. I think this is a key point. Even if a wheat or a corn crop, we harvest it for grain, over half of the biomass we produce is an edible. And one estimate from researchers in Germany said that for every kilo of vegan food, four to five kilos of inedible biomass are produced. So what are you going to do with that? I would suggest, you know, if you want to eat that, fine, let's feed that to livestock and, okay, get value from it. So what gives me hope is, like I say, I know a lot of individuals who know a great deal more about all these topics, but they operate in silos as we are trained to do, right? And my role is to try to build bridges between those silos to connect dots. And maybe also since, you know, I'm retired, you know, I'm not part of an institution, I have a little leeway that maybe others don't feel like they have at the moment. One colleague says that we need to stop building silos and start building lighthouses. And so there are efforts like the Dublin Declaration of Scientists, which I recommend people look up and read that. And I'm pleased to be a part of that. I'm pleased to be part of international efforts that are going on to try to get the metabolic health message into my agricultural tribes and related tribes, as well as to try to encourage people within the metabolic health space to, you know, if you have sincere concerns, there's information available. And I share, you know, that that's what we're doing. But at the other side is I want people to feel comfortable telling people to not rationalize not making the changes that they need to make in their life to improve their health. And so much of this just smacks of, oh, you know, I can't do that because or the what about ism? It's like, no, no, no, no, no. You know, are we really weighing the odds of dying with all the toes you were born with against what's going to happen to global temperature in 2100? Is that really the conversation we're having? Would you like to be healthy and strong enough to play with your grandchildren? Would you like to have children? We know the influence of metabolic health and fertility, right? All of these questions. And yet we keep having these points thrown out. And for people that are working with free living human beings, I just encourage you to feel confident in what you know from your clinical and personal experience. And these other issues, actually, it turns out that will be better off if we go this way than if we follow the way of these others. Now, am I seeing progress? Yes, some, you know, here and there. And I think that that's also part of what we have to have courage in that a tipping point doesn't have to be 51%. It can be 18, 25%. Right? It's- So give me an example of where you've seen some progress, you know, some listening to your message. Oh, I, like any of us, I have a number of people who say, I heard you talking about this. I read the things that you recommended. I'm no longer diabetic and my doctor's impressed, right? And then you could wonder, well, how impressed is your doctor? Would your doctor like to read something? You know, could we like- So there's that idea of multiplying the pivotal patient, right, that be the change that someone else sees and then, oh, okay. So I've seen those, you know, groups that I am affiliated with are well aware of this message. And so it's communicated to wider and wider audiences and they're giving us the opportunity to come in and make presentations or publish things. So I see that beginning to happen. And I'm also, you know, I'm optimistic, I'm not naive, right? So, you know, people can, people should and I'm glad they are working on policy top down. My goal is to work it from the bottom up. Because at some point, certainly in the US, we're going to reach a point where it's like, no, we're, the right people are going to get the message and they're going to be in the right place and they're going to affect the change. And our job is just to keep scattering out the, you know, the good news until people, the right people get it. Well, I'm glad you have a message that's resonating at least with these two tribes, the low-carb ancestral metabolic health interests groups and also on the other side, the agriculturalists, your, your ruminant animal agriculture friends. And I hope it permeates even more widely into the population and into policy. I think you're right. You can't always start with policy. It has to come from the bottom up. But we need both. We need both. You know, when you improve your health, you are improving the world. And maybe that's the most impactful thing most of us can do, right? Is, is we, we do the best for us. And then, you know, maybe our families, and then you have no idea who's watching. So you just do that. And, and, you know, then, you know, what do you, what do you take to potlucks, right? Do you stop off and, you know, or do you actually, you know, so those sorts of issues. The other one, you know, the word existential gets used a lot. So I figure what the heck I'll join. Humanity's existential crisis is insufficient animal source food. Yeah, I think that's a wonderful statement to end on. That the role of animal food in addressing our existential crisis is, is, is abundantly clear. And Peter, I think what we're going to do is, if you can provide some links to some of your talks and other resources, I know there's sometimes you have to dive into the statistics here, we'll have that available for our listeners. But maybe if you could just end by telling us, where can folks find you online? You can find me on, I guess I'm supposed to call it X now at grass based also same thing on Instagram. I have a grass based health page on Facebook. You can email me at peter.ballerstead at gmail.com. You search for Peter Ballerstead on YouTube, and you'll find me and you'll find talks that I've given over the years. Great. Well, thanks very much again for talking with us today, Peter Ballerstead, and look forward to hearing from you more. Certainly, maybe one of the ancestral health symposia in the future when we grab that up again. Thank you, Todd. I'd love to sit down and have a conversation in person. Great to see you. Great. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Ancestral Health Today. We hope you enjoyed our discussion on how evolutionary insights can inform modern health practices. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast to catch future episodes.